101 Questions on Swatches Panel

[johndugan]

Hi Folks,

 

I am new to Affinity Designer. I have 3 questions related to the swatches panel:

 

1. Is there a way to resize the panel? A lot of space is wasted on swatches that only have a handful of colors.
2. I accidentally deleted a couple swatches when I was playing around trying to remove colors from a particular swatch (note to self: "delete palette" does not mean "clear pallet"). They were default swatches. Is there a way to get them back?
3. Is there a way to change the swatch color tooltip value from RGB to Hex (or anything else for that matter)?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

john

 

[firstdefence]

3 hours ago, johndugan said:

Is there a way to resize the panel? A lot of space is wasted on swatches that only have a handful of colors.

Depends what you have below the Swatches panel, if you have a panel that only takes up a small amount of space the swatches panel will remain large (length wise) and the panel below will stay seated to the bottom. There is; for me, an annoying behaviour with Panels whereby the Panels do not remember their dimensions i..e. how they have been set.

 

An example of this is:

• Have the Swatches Panel at the top
• Below the Swatches Panel, have the Colour Panel and the Assets Panel.
• Click on the Assets Panel and scale it up so the Swatches Panel is smaller.
• Now switch to the Colour Panel, you cannot make the Colour Panel Larger.
• Switch back to the Assets Panel.
• The Assets Panel adopts the position of the Colour Panel instead of retaining its location. set previously.

By rights, the Assets Panel should remember where it was set but it doesn't and this makes resizing Panels a bit of a moot point.

 

 

3 hours ago, johndugan said:

I accidentally deleted a couple swatches when I was playing around trying to remove colors from a particular swatch (note to self: "delete palette" does not mean "clear pallet"). They were default swatches. Is there a way to get them back?

Preferences > Miscellaneous > Reset Fills

 

Quote

1. Is there a way to change the swatch color tooltip value from RGB to Hex (or anything else for that matter)?

I don't think so, there is no Hex Sliders option and the tooltip will show whatever slider option is selected, I could be wrong.

[toltec]

 

3 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

 

I don't think so, there is no Hex Sliders option and the tooltip will show whatever slider option is selected, I could be wrong.

 

I believe that is the swatch name. So short of "renaming" every colour what you see is what you get.

 

To rename, right click and choose Rename Fill

[firstdefence]

3 minutes ago, toltec said:

 

 

I believe that is the swatch name. So short of "renaming" every colour what you see is what you get.

 

To rename, right click and choose Rename Fill

I was half right, Whatever method for colour selection is used in Colour Chooser from the dropdown menu, will be the name allocated to the colour when added to the swatches palette 

[R C-R]

59 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

I was half right, Whatever method for colour selection is used in Colour Chooser from the dropdown menu, will be the name allocated to the colour when added to the swatches palette 

At least for me, this only works if I set or change an object's color using the Color Chooser window. IOW, just opening the Color Chooser window & changing the dropdown from (for example) RGB Sliders to CMYK Sliders but not changing the color of a selected object does not change the default name of a newly added swatch from RGB to CMYK values. Also, this is limited to CMYK, RGB/8, & HSL swatch name values. It would be nice if there was some way to have the names default to LAB/16, RGB/16, or particularly RGB Hex values as well.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

There is; for me, an annoying behaviour with Panels whereby the Panels do not remember their dimensions i..e. how they have been set.

Setting the height of the various Studio panels & tabbed panel groups can be tricky. I think this because some panels have a fixed non-adjustable height & others have only a minimum height limit. So when a mix of fixed & adjustable height panels are in tabbed groups, depending on which tabbed panel is selected, the height of the tabbed group may have to change to make room for its minimum, currently set, or fixed height. This in turn can affect the heights of other panels in the Studio. And since it seems to be only the current height of the panel group that is remembered (even if it is just a single panel), switching to another panel in the group does not necessarily switch the group height back to the previous setting.

 

Plus, it seems as though when some tabbed groups are set to certain tabs they block changing the height of adjacent panels in the same Studio.

 

Basically, I think it is that the underlying logic that sets the panel heights must be so convoluted to support all the different possible configurations that just understanding how it is supposed to work is very difficult, much less if it is working as designed or a bit buggy.

[johndugan]

Wow - thank you all for the thoughtful comments. They were very helpful!

 

The big letdown for me is the lack of functionality of panel resizing. It seems silly that the interface does not limit vertical scrolling automatically (by collapsing blank space in adjacent panels), nor let you manually resize panels.

 

 

[toltec]

You

19 minutes ago, johndugan said:

, nor let you manually resize panels.

 

 

You can manually resize the swatches panel, certainly smaller than you have

 

3

 

You can also collapse groups in the studio by double clicking on the name i.e. Swatches.

 

 

Another option is to place the panel elsewhere (above the image) and collapse/expand as required. You can do this with a keyboard shortcut.